Studies are being conducted to determine the mechanisms through which the cerebral cortex exerts controls over eye movements and visual attention in the monkey. Single cell recordings are made while the monkeys perform a series of visual tasks involving eye movements or visual fixation. We have found that the frontal eye fields contain a neural mechanism for the generation of visually-guided eye movements. Visual neurons in this area yield enhanced discharges before eye movements to stimuli in their receptive fields. The amplitude and direction of eye movements evoked by stimulation at the site of frontal visual cells correlate with the receptive field locations for those cells. The threshold and amplitude of eye movements evoked by electrical stimulation of the frontal eye fields can be affected by the act of purposeful visual fixation. When the animal is actively performing a visual task, the brain is relatively refractory to stimulation of the frontal eye fields. These data imply that there is a special neural mechanism involving the frontal fields that is unique to those eye movements involved in purposeful visual behavior.